Elsa Dorlin | To Be Beside of Oneself: Fanon and the Phenomenology of Our Own Violence

  O my body, make of me always a man who questions! —Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)1   Pathogenic Subjectivity Commentary on Frantz Fanon’s oeuvre tends to consider The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, as the work that breaks with the Martinican thinker’s post-slavery analysis, which was developed nine years earlier in his first book, Black Skin, White Masks. Some say that Fanon’s point of view radicalized during this period: with an imminently independent Algeria, Fanon abandoned the socio-psycho­analytic point of view which he had elaborated in order to theorize post-slavery French society. If The Wretched of the Earth privileges a political style,…